Chicago Referencing – Citing an Edited Book (Author–Date Style)

On this blog, we’ve already covered how to cite an edited book using Chicago-style footnotes. However, Chicago referencing also uses parenthetical author–date citations. Thus, the time has come to discuss citing an edited book using author–date citations in Chicago referencing.

Author–Date Citations

According to the Chicago Manual of Style, author–date citations should be given in the main text of your essay whenever you reference a source.

For a chapter from an edited book, give the name of the chapter author and the year the edited book was published. If quoting or paraphrasing a source, you should also provide relevant page numbers after a comma:

A self-evident proposition is one that ‘does not stand in need of proof’ (Ayer 1975, 80).

If the author is already named in the text, though, only the date and relevant page numbers need to be given in parentheses:

Ayer (1975, 80) states that a self-evident proposition is one that ‘does not stand in need of proof’.

Although less common, you can also cite an edited book as a whole by giving the editor’s name in place of an author’s name:

In Phenomenology and Philosophical Understanding (Pivčević 1975), various offshoots of the phenomenological tradition are presented.

If citing an edited book in its entirety, however, no page numbers are required (if you were citing a particular section, you’d name the chapter author instead).

Reference List

For all sources cited in your essay, add an entry to the reference list at the end of your document. This means listing sources alphabetically by author surname and giving full publication information for each one. You should also use a hanging indent for entries that spread to more than one line.

With a chapter from an edited book, the information required is:

Surname, First Name/Initials. Year. ‘Chapter Title’. In Book Title, edited by Editor Name(s), page range. City of Publication: Publisher.

For the essay cited above, the reference list entry would therefore appear as:

Ayer, A. J. 1975. ‘Self-evidence’. In Phenomenology and Philosophical Understanding, edited by Edo Pivčević, 79-92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

If citing an edited book as a whole, meanwhile, you should name the editor instead of an author:

Surname, First Name, ed. Year. Book Title. City of Publication: Publisher.

For the edited book cited above, then, the reference list entry would be:

Pivčević, Edo, ed. 1975. Phenomenology and Philosophical Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

In either case, you should only reverse the first listed author/editor’s names. If a source has more than one author, additional names are listed in the conventional order (i.e. first name, followed by surname).